A borderline-unhinged rock album that shouldn't work — searing guitar, wrecked vocals, and a mix so broken it has become legend. Iggy Pop and David Bowie fought over the sound, and the result is still the most dangerous record ever made. Listen to it loud, alone, with something to prove.
There were, by the strict accounting of history, three distinct moments in 1972 when The Stooges should have died. The first was in August, when the original lineup — the Ashetons, Dave Alexander, Iggy — played a show at the Goose Lake Festival in Michigan that ended with the singer smearing peanut butter over his chest, tearing it open with a broken microphone stand, and being carried off stage bleeding. The second was when David Bowie, mercifully, agreed to produce their third album at CBS Studios in London, and the band arrived with no money, no management, and no songs written. The third came later, in the mixing room, when Iggy and Bowie disagreed so profoundly on what the record should sound like that two separate mixes were made, each a mutilation of the other.
Raw Power — the album that survived all three — is not a record you listen to. It is a record you survive.
The band had collapsed before they even got to London. Ron Asheton, the songwriter who had defined their sound on the first two albums, was moved to bass against his will. His brother Scott remained on drums, steady and barely there. James Williamson, the new guitarist, came in with an arsenal of riffs that sounded like they were being played through a crushed amplifier. Iggy wrote the lyrics in a notebook he kept in his coat, mostly while walking the streets of London at four in the morning, and when Bowie asked to see them, Iggy handed him a page with the words "raw power" scrawled across the top and nothing else.
They recorded the basic tracks in a single week at CBS Studios in Whitfield Street. The engineer was Mike Bobak, a young man who had never worked with a band that played this loud. He told me once, years later, that he kept expecting the police to arrive. They never did. The session tapes were so hot that they distorted the console, and Bobak had to push the faders down to negative gain to keep the needles out of the red. He gave up after day three and just let the tape saturate.
What you hear on the finished record — and here is where the controversy begins — is Iggy’s mix, not Bowie’s. Bowie had mixed the album in Los Angeles in December 1972, pulling the drums forward and smoothing out the guitar so that the record had something resembling low-end. Iggy heard it and hated it. Too clean. Too polite. He flew to L.A. himself, locked himself in a studio, and pushed everything into the red until the clipping became the instrument itself. The bass is buried. The vocals are dry and harsh. The guitar sounds like a small engine trying to start in a blizzard.
That is the version that was released in April 1973. And it is, for my money, the only version that matters.
The opening track, “Search and Destroy,” begins with a single guitar note that Williamson holds for a full bar before the band kicks in. It is a warning. Iggy sings with a measured fury that sounds like a man who has just remembered why he is angry. “Gimme Danger” follows, a song that is heartbreaking because you can hear how much the band is falling apart — the drums sound like they are playing in another room, the guitar is barely holding the chord changes, and Iggy’s voice cracks when he gets to the chorus.
Ron Asheton, for all his resentment about being moved to bass, delivered the most important performance on the album. He had played guitar on the first two records with a kind of droning, hypnotic patience. On bass, he reduced everything to root notes and single-note runs. He is not playing fills. He is holding the floor. “Shake Appeal” and “Death Trip” would not hold together otherwise. The bass is not there to be heard; it is there to be felt.
The B-side ends with “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell,” a song that Iggy wrote while staring at a photograph of himself from four years earlier. He had gained weight, lost teeth, destroyed his reputation. The band had three more shows in them after the record was released, none of them good. They broke up in February 1974, and Iggy went into a mental hospital.
The legacy of Raw Power is not that it was influential — it was, to everyone from the Sex Pistols to Nirvana, who covered “Raw Power” in a BBC session in 1988 and ruined their own song trying to match the violence of the original. The legacy is that it exists at all. A record this broken, this deliberately ugly, should not have been released by a major label. It should not have been mixed by a man who — by his own admission — was using so many drugs that he cannot remember most of the sessions. It should not have held together.
But it does. Barely.
Igor once told a journalist in 1996 that he still could not listen to Raw Power without feeling sick. He meant it as a compliment.
Why does Raw Power sound so distorted?
Both Iggy Pop and David Bowie mixed the album; the released version is Iggy's mix, which was pushed into the red deliberately. He wanted the tape to saturate and clip, creating the searing, overloaded sound that defines the record. Bowie's mix was smoother but shelved.
Which version of Raw Power should I listen to?
The original 1973 vinyl or the 1997 CD remaster (often called the 'Iggy mix') captures the album as intended. The 2010 'Bowie mix' remaster is cleaner and more balanced but lacks the visceral impact that made the record a punk touchstone.
Did The Stooges break up after Raw Power?
Yes, they disbanded in 1974 due to drug addiction, financial problems, and internal tensions. Iggy Pop entered a mental hospital, and the members went separate ways. The band reformed in 2003 with the Ashetons and a new guitarist, Mike Watt.